


three views of a city street

by stylusmaleficarum (cygnes)



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 11:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8799265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/stylusmaleficarum
Summary: Credence Barebone meets an auror named Graves. That much is constant.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted [here](https://stylusmaleficarum.tumblr.com/post/154248811557/three-views-of-a-city-street) on tumblr.
> 
> See the endnote for warnings.

> i. facing south

Mary Lou Barebone will feed any child off the streets who is willing to trade their time for bread, but she only adopts girls. Girls, she tells her daughters frequently, are more apt to fall into sinful ways. For love, or greed, or out of desperation—there are more ways to be damned than to sign the devil’s book. 

She renames her daughters for virtues so they’ll always be reminded. Chastity will never bear a child out of wedlock, Credence will know God’s truth from man’s lies, Modesty will never roll down her stockings and go dancing. But she worries—oh, she worries. That’s what she tells them. 

Chastity thinks otherwise. She is ma’s good girl; she takes ma’s side against Credence and Modesty when they do wrong. But this is because she’s smart enough to save her own hide rather than air her grievances. She tells these to Credence instead: the one secret that binds them together as sisters. When ma beats Credence black and blue and Chastity says nothing, Credence holds these whispered criticisms close to her heart. Chastity is only staying safe. In their shared bed, in the close warm dark, she tells Credence the truth.

“She picks girls because the men like to look at us,” Chastity says. “She wouldn’t let them touch us, not ever, but she knows why they come. What they want.” 

Credence draws the blankets up to her chin and shakes her head. 

“Don’t you believe me?” Chastity says. 

“I don’t _want_ to believe you,” Credence says, which is as good as saying yes.

Credence flinches from the gaze of strangers more than ever, after that conversation, and gets hell for it. She is telling the truth, she is spreading the word, and God would give her courage and make her bold enough for the mission if only she could accept Him into her heart. Ma tells her this for the better part of a half hour. When she’s done, Credence has to wear her winter dress, even though it’s May. (It wouldn’t be good for the mission if anyone saw the state of her arms.)

She is wary of the men who take her pamphlets. More women take them than men—a greater tendency toward pity, she thinks. Once a man takes her hand and holds it, won’t let her go until she jerks back with all her strength. She finds Chastity a block over and clings to her. Credence weeps and shakes. 

“Not now,” Chastity hisses. “Not here. You’re making a scene.”

Ma hears about it, and not from Chastity. She has eyes and ears everywhere. Someone has won an extra bowl of soup for tattling. Credence has won a night locked in the cellar contemplating her inherited wanton tendencies. (Because, ma tells her, it must be some lingering wickedness from the woman who gave birth to her. No reflection, surely, on the woman who had raised her to be righteous.) 

So the men look at Chastity and they look at Credence (and someday they will look at Modesty if she doesn’t run away before then). But the girls never look back. They would never dare.

Until, one day, Credence does. 

It is a day in one of the thin grey weeks that follow the bright spark of her waking dream. She dreamed a witch (a good witch, like a fairy godmother or an avenging angel) had come and made ma stop hitting her. It must have been a dream, because no one else remembers it. And dreaming while she’s awake means Credence might be going mad. So she doesn’t talk about it, not even to Chastity, not even when Chastity speaks her mutinous thoughts out loud at night.

The man Credence looks at is perhaps twice her age, handsome and well-dressed and somehow strange. He seems bright, too, and she wonders if she’s dreaming again. 

After the meeting, the man takes a pamphlet from Credence and gives her his name. Mr. Graves, he says—an ominous name, but no more so than Barebone. He stands too close and tells her in conspiratorial terms that she could be a witch. That there is magic in her, and he could teach her to use it. 

It’s everything she wants and everything she most dreads. Her heart beats fast, faster, until she thinks it might burst. Surely this is the devil come to tempt her in the form she finds most pleasing. But he doesn’t ask her to sign his book in blood. He doesn’t ask her to come to the forest and be his unholy bride. He doesn’t ask her for anything much at all—only to keep an eye out, to listen closely.

He never asks for more than that, though Credence is increasingly aware that she would give it to him. _Anything, anything_ , she whispers against his cheek when he fastens the pendant around her neck. 

Mr. Graves is not the devil, but he makes empty bargains. He takes and takes and gives nothing back.

> ii. facing north

Mary Lou Barebone will feed any child off the streets who is willing to trade their time for bread, but she only adopts the ones most in need of moral instruction. Chastity’s mother was a woman of loose proclivities, and Modesty’s family was full of drunkards and thieves. She never tells Credence exactly what sins his ancestors had committed, and that worries him most of all. 

Chastity is ma’s good girl, and seems as eager as their mother to let him take the brunt of the blame and the punishment. He hates her for it in his most secret heart of hearts, just a little. But he knows there’s a strategy there, too: he’s the man of the house. Chastity keeps well out of the way because he’s supposed to be the strongest. He should be able to bear the lion’s share. And Chastity can look after Modesty, keep her out of the line of fire. They don’t talk about it, but he thinks he understands. Chastity is fighting some other, private battle. Maybe she’s losing. But they don’t talk, not really, so he can’t know.

Ma writes her own sermons and preaches them, all scorching hellfire making way for the glory. She’s the one who knows how to talk to people. Credence isn’t good at that part. He can talk to children, because they trust him, and he knows what it’s like to be young and scared. Adults—most adults, anyway—are suspicious of him. He knows it’s the pamphlets or his ill-fitting much-mended clothes that put them off. He knows, but he’s always afraid it’s something else. That they see in him what ma sees in him. 

“Ma’am, do you have a moment to hear about our work?” Credence says, not quite looking at the woman he’s addressing. It’s easier to stomach being ignored if he doesn’t also have to see their eyes glance off him like he’s something distasteful.

“For you, I can spare a whole minute.” He looks up, then, drawn by a low, melodious voice. Women take pamphlets more often than men, but not women like this. She’s older than Credence by at least a decade, perhaps more. She might even be as old as ma, if she’s lived an easier life. The woman is elegant, well-dressed. There is nothing weather-beaten or threadbare about her. She stands apart from the crowd, but no one else seems to notice her.

He is reminded immediately of the woman who had defended him. That had been a witch, of course, and while he had at first thought her intervention was kind, he sees it now for what it was. The witch must have defended him because she saw that they were alike in their propensity for choosing evil over good. She meant to tempt him into wickedness. 

He wonders if this woman means to tempt him into another kind of wickedness. But, no—he is young and thin and awkward, and she is beautiful in the distant way that women in magazines are beautiful. She calls herself Miss Graves, which sounds too severe for her. He says so (foolishly) and she only laughs. It isn’t a malicious kind of laugh, which is another strange thing about her. 

Miss Graves makes him an offer, and he accepts it with little hesitation. She offers him a way out. She offers him a demurely gloved hand cupping his cheek; she calls him her _dear boy_. Miss Graves only wants Credence to help her, and then they can go away together. He understands enough to know that there is a part of the promise she isn’t saying, in case she changes her mind. He turns his head to follow her hand and hopes she means to keep him.

She doesn’t keep him. She tears him apart, and he doesn’t even get to return the favor.

> iii. facing west

Mary Lou Barebone adopts only girls from bad families, with innate weakness and wickedness in their blood, and makes sure they know enough to be glad of it. Chastity’s mother died giving birth to a second bastard daughter and left her first child of sin an orphan. Modesty’s father went to jail a cutpurse; her mother was poor enough to sell off a daughter to a stranger in order to buy more patent medicine for herself. She never talks about Credence’s family, so they all suspect the worst. 

“Your mother must have been a witch,” Modesty says, somewhere between vicious and awed. Credence flinches. The three girls are alone in the kitchen, but the walls are very thin. 

“It doesn’t matter who she was,” Chastity says. She is ma’s good girl and is therefore most qualified to deliver judgment. “We’re all children of God and we can correct our ways through diligence and prayer.” Modesty accepts this and goes back to scrubbing the stock pot. 

At night, though, Chastity whispers, “you’re not a witch, are you?”

“No,” Credence whispers back, horrified. She thinks there is something unnatural in her but hopes it isn’t that. “At least—you can’t become a witch by accident, can you?”

Chastity turns away from her then. They stop keeping secrets for each other. Credence thinks at first that Chastity is disgusted by the thought of magic under their roof, but then, perhaps it’s something baser than that. Perhaps she resents Credence for being ordinary, too. Perhaps she resents Credence for not offering them all a way out.

When Credence has a vision, she wonders if it comes from God or the devil.  She sees a woman (a witch) come to help her. It might be a warning, or an invitation to sin. Joan of Arc had visions, too. Ma has no time for saints, or any other Catholic nonsense, but she uses Joan of Arc as an object-lesson in her sermons. It can be hard to tell witchcraft from miracles. But miracles are rarer, and it is better to err on the side of caution. Ma pities Joan of Arc but stops short of calling her a martyr. 

Credence does not presume to think she is holy or special. She prays for guidance and doesn’t see any more witches and the world resumes its daily plodding pace.

Until it stops short again.

The woman Credence will come to know as Miss Graves is sleekly dressed, her hair cut modishly short. She is about of a height with Credence, or perhaps a little shorter, but more shapely. More feminine. (Credence is all sharp angles and too-long limbs, third-hand dresses and hair falling unevenly to her shoulders.) Women stop to take pamphlets more often than men, but not sharp professional-looking women like this. There is a little pin in her hat shaped like a scorpion, and Credence could almost swear she sees it move when she looks away.

“Are you a witch?” Credence says. Her voice sounds less frightened than it should. 

“I think that’s a question for another time,” Miss Graves says, which is as good as saying yes. 

Credence meets Miss Graves in the evenings, in dim alleyways where she might easily meet someone much less kind than Miss Graves. Miss Graves always arrives, though, and makes it worth the danger. She strokes Credence’s hair, heals the welts on her hands, and tells her that she is special. That she is a miracle, and that sometimes witchcraft and miracles are the same thing. 

Miss Graves gives Credence a pendant and kisses her softly, just to the right of the mouth. _My dear girl_ , she says. Credence looks at her reflection in a shop window on the walk back home, expecting to see a witch’s mark blooming across her cheek, but there isn’t even a smudge of lipstick. She wonders if Miss Graves is the devil, taking the form most pleasing to her, which is evidence for its own kind of sin. Maybe the pendant will burn a mark into her skin.

But it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The metal rests warm against her sternum, a small solace as ma drags Credence up the stairs by her hair. Ma accuses her of meeting a man. Chastity doesn’t come to her defense. But she leads Modesty away, which is another kind of help. 

Credence only really understands that she was in love when Miss Graves breaks her heart. And by then it’s too late.

> (iv. facing east

You already know this story, and it doesn’t end any better than the others.)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for canonical child abuse and manipulation, mild sexual menace, religion used to justify misogyny (and also the aforementioned abuse), brief mention of internalized homophobia.


End file.
